The key to understanding the doctrine of the essays which are herewith
reprinted lies in the passages regarding the temporal development of
experience. Setting out from a conviction (more current at the time
when the essays were written than it now is) that knowledge implies
judgment (and hence, thinking) the essays try to show (1) that such
terms as "thinking," "reflection," "judgment" denote inquiries or the
results of inquiry, and (2) that inquiry occupies an intermediate and
mediating place in the development of an experience. If this be
granted, it follows at once that a philosophical discussion of the
distinctions and relations which figure most largely in logical
theories depends upon a proper placing of them in their temporal
context; and that in default of such placing we are prone to transfer
the traits of the subject-matter of one phase to that of another--with
a confusing outcome.
I
1. An intermediary stage for knowledge (that is, for knowledge
comprising reflection and having a distinctively intellectual quality)
implies a prior stage of a different kind, a kind variously
characterized in the essays as social, affectional, technological,
aesthetic, etc. It may most easily be described from a negative point
of view: it is a type of experience which cannot be called a knowledge
experience without doing violence to the term "knowledge" and to
experience. It may contain knowledge resulting from prior inquiries;
it may include thinking within itself; but not so that they dominate
the situation and give it its peculiar flavor. Positively, anyone
recognizes the difference between an experience of quenching thirst
where the perception of water is a mere incident, and an experience of
water where knowledge of what water is, is the controlling interest;
or between the enjoyment of social converse among friends and a study
deliberately made of the character of one of the participants; between
aesthetic appreciation of a picture and an examination of it by a
connoisseur to establish the artist, or by a dealer who has a
commercial interest in determining its probable selling value. The
distinction between the two types of experience is evident to anyone
who will take the trouble to recall what he does most of the time when
not engaged in meditation or inquiry.
But since one does not think about knowledge except when he is
_thinking_, except, that is, when the intellectual or cognitional
interest is dominant, the professional philosopher is only too prone
to think of all experiences as if they were of the type he is
specially engaged in, and hence unconsciously or intentionally to
project _its_ traits into experiences to which they are alien. Unless
he takes the simple precaution of holding before his mind contrasting
experiences like those just mentioned, he generally forms a habit of
supposing that no qualities or things at all are present in experience
except as objects of some kind of apprehension or awareness.
Overlooking, and afterward denying, that things and qualities are
present to most men most of the time as things and qualities in
situations of prizing and aversion, of seeking and finding, of
converse, enjoyment and suffering, of production and employment, of
manipulation and destruction, he thinks of things as either totally
absent from experience or else there as objects of "consciousness" or
knowing. This habit is a tribute to the _importance_ of reflection and
of the knowledge which accrues from it. But a discussion of knowledge
perverted at the outset by such a misconception is not likely to
proceed prosperously.
All this is not to deny that some element of reflection or inference
may be required in any situation to which the term "experience" is
applicable in any way which contrasts with, say, the "experience" of
an oyster or a growing bean vine. Men experience illness. What they
experience is certainly something very different from an object of
apprehension, yet it is quite possible that what makes an illness into
a _conscious_ experience is precisely the intellectual elements which
intervene--a certain taking of some things as representative of other
things. My thesis about the primary character of non-reflectional
experience is not intended to preclude this hypothesis--which appears
to me a highly plausible one. But it is indispensable to note that,
even in such cases, the intellectual element is set in a context which
is non-cognitive and which holds within it in suspense a vast complex
of other qualities and things that in the experience itself are
objects of esteem or aversion, of decision, of use, of suffering, of
endeavor and revolt, not of knowledge. When, in a subsequent
reflective experience, we look back and find these things and
qualities (quales would be a better word, or values, if the latter word
were not so open to misconstruction), we are only too prone to suppose
that they were then what they are now--objects of a cognitive regard,
themes of an intellectual gesture. Hence, the erroneous conclusion
that things are either just out of experience, or else are (more or
less badly) known objects.
In any case the best way to study the character of those cognitional
factors which are merely incidental in so many of our experiences is
to study them in the type of experience where they are most prominent,
where they dominate; where knowing, in short, is the prime concern.
Such study will also, by a reflex reference, throw into greater relief
the contrasted characteristic traits of the non-reflectional types of
experience. In such contrast the significant traits of the latter are
seen to be internal organization: (1) the factors and qualities hang
together; there is a great variety of them but they are saturated with
a pervasive quality. Being ill with the grippe is an experience which
includes an immense diversity of factors, but none the less is the one
qualitatively unique experience which it is. Philosophers in their
exclusively intellectual preoccupation with analytic knowing are only
too much given to overlooking the primary import of the term "thing":
namely, _res_, an affair, an occupation, a "cause"; something which is
similar to having the grippe, or conducting a political campaign, or
getting rid of an overstock of canned tomatoes, or going to school, or
paying attention to a young woman:--in short, just what is meant in
non-philosophic discourse by "an experience." Noting things only as if
they were objects--that is, objects of knowledge--continuity is
rendered a mystery; qualitative, pervasive unity is too often regarded
as a subjective state injected into an object which does not possess
it, as a mental "construct," or else as a trait of being to be
attained to only by recourse to some curious organ of knowledge termed
intuition. In like fashion, organization is thought of as the achieved
outcome of a highly scientific knowledge, or as the result of
transcendental rational synthesis, or as a fiction superinduced by
association, upon elements each of which in its own right "is a
separate existence." One advantage of an excursion by one who
philosophizes upon knowledge into primary non-reflectional experience
is that the excursion serves to remind him that every empirical
situation has its own organization of a direct, non-logical character.
(2) Another trait of every _res_ is that it has focus and context:
brilliancy and obscurity, conspicuousness or apparency, and
concealment or reserve, with a constant movement of redistribution.
Movement about an axis persists, but what is in focus constantly
changes. "Consciousness," in other words, is only a very small and
shifting portion of experience. The scope and content of the focused
apparency have immediate dynamic connections with portions of
experience not at the time obvious. The word which I have just written
is momentarily focal; around it there shade off into vagueness my
typewriter, the desk, the room, the building, the campus, the town,
and so on. _In_ the experience, and in it in such a way as to
_qualify_ even what is shiningly apparent, are all the physical
features of the environment extending out into space no one can say
how far, and all the habits and interests extending backward and
forward in time, of the organism which uses the typewriter and which
notes the written form of the word only as temporary focus in a vast
and changing scene. I shall not dwell upon the import of this fact in
its critical bearings upon theories of experience which have been
current. I shall only point out that when the word "experience" is
employed in the text it means just such an immense and operative world
of diverse and interacting elements.
It might seem wiser, in view of the fact that the term "experience" is
so frequently used by philosophers to denote something very different
from such a world, to use an acknowledgedly objective term: to talk
about the typewriter, for example. But experience in ordinary usage
(as distinct from its technical use in psychology and philosophy)
expressly denotes something which a specific term like "typewriter"
does _not_ designate: namely, the indefinite range of context in which
the typewriter is _actually_ set, its spatial and temporal
environment, including the habitudes, plans, and activities of its
operator. And if we are asked why not then use a general objective
term like "world," or "environment," the answer is that the word
"experience" suggests something indispensable which these terms omit:
namely, an actual focusing of the world at one point in a focus of
immediate shining apparency. In other words, in its ordinary human
usage, the term "experience" was invented and employed previously
because of the necessity of having some way to refer peremptorily to
what is indicated in only a roundabout and divided way by such terms
as "organism" and "environment," "subject" and "object," "persons"
and "things," "mind" and "nature," and so on.[1]